Rare Time When Rivera’s Second Best Isn’t Good Enough

Chris Stewart offered some words of support after Mariano Rivera was stuck with his second blown save of the season.

Barton Silverman / The New York Times

By DAVID WALDSTEIN

July 7, 2013

There have been many great myths in baseball, like Abner Doubleday inventing the game and Babe Ruth calling his shot in the World Series. Mariano Rivera throwing only one pitch is another.

Rivera has carved out what will almost surely be a Hall of Fame career by predominantly throwing the cut fastball, or cutter. But ask any right-handed major league hitter who has played in the past several years, and he can verify that Rivera also throws a healthy number of two-seam fastballs.

Last month, Rivera threw eight pitches to the Los Angeles Angels’ dangerous right-handed sluggers Mike Trout and Albert Pujols in two tense at-bats. Seven of them were two-seamers, a pitch that tends to move in on right-handed hitters. Pujols struck out on three of them.

As with the cutter, Rivera has had great success with the two-seamer over the past several years, including a stretch in June when he threw 25 fastballs out of 47 pitches, most of them to beefy right-handers looking for a cutter over the plate. On Sunday, Adam Jones was the one who had success with it.

With one out in the ninth inning, Rivera, who wore his socks to his knees in support of David Robertson’s All-Star candidacy, threw a two-seamer to Jones. The high socks were unusual; the two-seamer was not.

But the pitch did not get inside enough, and Jones drilled it into the center-field stands for a two-run homer that propelled the Baltimore Orioles to a 2-1 victory over the Yankees.

The loss ended the Yankees’ winning streak at six and erased a masterly performance by Hiroki Kuroda, who shook off a minor hip injury to pitch seven scoreless innings, allowing three hits.

“It’s difficult,” Rivera said. “It’s a loss. The way Kuroda was pitching, he was doing outstanding. He was great, and I thought it would be a good game to save. I don’t think the other ones are not good to save. But this one should have been great, and I did that.”

It was the second blown save for Rivera in 31 chances this season and the 75th of his career, compared with 637 saves. It was also his first blown save at Yankee Stadium since 2011, a stretch in which he converted 41 straight opportunities here.

Baltimore’s Adam Jones (10) hit a two-run homer in the ninth inning.

Barton Silverman / The New York Times

His last blown save was May 28 against the Mets. In that game, Rivera threw cutters to the left-hander Daniel Murphy, who doubled, and then three straight two-seam fastballs to the right-handed David Wright, who singled home the tying run.

“He’s been throwing two-seamers to me for about five years,” said Vernon Wells, who had faced Rivera as a member of the Toronto Blue Jays and the Angels before joining the Yankees this year. “They are both very tough pitches to hit.”

Yankees catcher Chris Stewart said he liked to call for the fastball when he noticed right-handers like Pujols looking out over the plate. According to Manager Joe Girardi, Rivera began throwing more fastballs to right-handers when teams sent up right-handed pinch-hitters to face him.

The two pitches dart in opposite directions. Rivera’s cut fastball rides from right to left, in on the hands of left-handed hitters, whose bats sometimes break when the ball hits the thin part of the handle. When he throws the two-seamer, it tends to break the other way.

But location is always the key with Rivera. Ichiro Suzuki, who once homered off a cutter from Rivera when he played for Seattle, pointed out that Rivera was an expert at locating the pitch to different points in the strike zone.

Rivera’s cutter is really four pitches, according to the Yankees’ pitching coach, Larry Rothschild. “He can throw it up and in, up and away, down and in and down and away,” Rothschild said. “If he’s got the two-seamer, people have to keep it in the back of their mind, too.”

Even though he is regularly lauded for throwing only one pitch — Rivera learned the cutter in 1997 and threw it almost exclusively for the first portion of his career as a closer — Rivera does not go out of his way to correct that notion.

“I love it,” he said with a laugh on the Yankees’ recent trip.

In the ninth inning Sunday, he threw four pitches to Manny Machado, two fastballs and then two cutters, and got Machado to ground out. To Nick Markakis, he threw two cutters and then a fastball, and Markakis singled on the 0-2 pitch. Jones saw two fastballs.

“It’s too bad,” Rivera said. “Kuroda pitched a tremendous game. We should have won that game.”

As for the socks, it was not superstition, Rivera said; it was his way of showing support for Robertson in his bid to win Major League Baseball’s final vote contest to earn a spot at the All-Star Game. At first, Robertson did not know why Rivera had gone with the look. Once he figured it out, he was pleased by the gesture, even if Rivera blew a save.

“It was very nice that he did that for me,” Robertson said. “I really appreciate it.”